Happy Christmas to all readers of >Re:PHOTO. My wife and I still send Christmas Cards, actual cards rather than e-cards, put into envelopes, stamped and posted, or put through the doors of nearby friends and neighbours.
Most of those cards are from Traidcraft, an organisation that is “pioneering the future of fair trade. Traidcraft stands for changing peoples’ lives through trade, saving vanishing traditional skills from extinction, and celebrating a world of creativity and culture.” Linda sells their products in the local area on a non-profit basis, and we eat and drink many of them, though use rather fewer of the craft products. And when I say we still send cards, its Linda who writes almost all of them, most with a personal message which sometimes gets rather long and for a few is in a foreign language.
But I also like to send my own personal cards to a few friends, mainly fellow photographers – and also usually use the same one of my pictures on an e-card on social media. But this year I found it very difficult to select a suitable image, partly because I spent the first four months of the year still more or less in isolation because of Covid.
Even since I went back to work on May 1st – I just couldn’t bear to miss another May Day – I’ve still been very much cutting down on the events I photograph, going to take pictures less frequently and largely only covering those causes I feel most strongly about. I’ve always liked to use recent pictures on my cards, so there were rather fewer to choose from.
At the start of my Covid isolation in March 2019 I stopped updating My London Diary. I had nothing to write and post in it. And although I have gone back to work I’ve not felt able to resume posting on that site. Part of the reason is simply that the web site is filling up and I am close to the limit of the number of files that it can handle, 262,144. To continue with My London Diary and this blog I would need to move to a more expensive solution, and I may in any case soon have to delete some older content. In past years I’ve always used pictures from My London Diary on these cards – but this year there were no new pictures on line.
So this year I chose one of the many pictures I’ve made on my walks and bike rides while I’ve been isolating, a winter scene from Staines Moor, a mile or so from my home. Not Christmassy, but at least it has snow.
i hope you have a good Christmas.